Chapter Ninety-Four. Sheriff Ryan
CHAPTER NINETY-FOUR
SHERIFF RYAN
Sheriff Ryan walks along the paved street of the Sherman Ranch development.
He spots a stray nail in the road, picks it up, and tucks it into the front pocket of his jeans.
He likes things to be orderly. So much of the world is chaos, but it doesn’t need to be, you can make it straight and solid.
A place for everything, and everything in its place.
That’s how he likes to live his life. It isn’t so hard, doing the right thing, not if you make it a habit.
There are more houses here now. A handful of families have moved in, their SUVs parked in the driveways, patio furniture on the front porch, welcome mats by the door.
Someone new works in the model home now.
They don’t live there; they clock out and lock up at 5 PM sharp.
Across the street, in the brush between the road and the river, Sheriff Ryan spots a grocery bag on the low-hanging branch of a live oak.
Watching it for a moment, it fills and deflates like a lung in the breeze.
When he steps off the road to collect it, his boot catches on a plastic box anchored in the brush.
He recognizes the camo-painted exterior, now fading.
It’s one of his and Mark Blake’s old trail cams. Cat must have set both the cameras up.
His knees pop when he squats down, and he lets out an involuntary grunt from the effort.
He can’t help thinking of when he was a young man, how he took for granted the simple glide of a joint, the ease of moving a body that hadn’t yet realized it was a dying thing.
He unhooks the camera, which runs on solar panels, so the screen powers up when he hits the button.
The camera was pointed directly at the model home, catching the street out front and a few dozen feet off to either side.
He rewinds, back and back, flipping quickly through footage of trucks driving by and delivery vans and that new property manager going in and out, back and back, to the night Cat died, to the window of time that the coroner had settled on, the time of Catherine Dennis’s death.
And there he stops, lets it all play out.
The night vision footage is black and white.
There is no sound to the video. He only watches it once, double-checking the time stamp to be sure, before ejecting the SD card, and slipping it into his pocket along with the stray nail.
He collects the camera and the stake it was strapped to, and heads back to his truck.
The decision on the state of things is made fast and as certain as a reflex, before he even turns over the engine.
And it unmakes him then and there. It’s as if he’d only ever been sewn together with thread, as if the universe only needed to tug on the right stitch to unravel him.
When he pulls away, he does so knowing full well that the better man he thought he was is being left behind in those woods.